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I was born on Dec.
21, 1978 RPM. I hated every minute of it until we moved to Woodstock, New York in
1945 at which time and place I discovered that the world had good stuff in it,
too. It was there I had my first intro to folk music, (except for the folk songs
I had been singing all my life and didnít know thatís what they were.) Many
of the artists, writers and musicians, in Woodstock, sang folk stuff and played
the guitar. There was a camaraderie among these folks that was new to me. Not
only did they seem to like and understand each other, but they included me in
that communal umbrella of feeling, even though I was new to them and just a
fourteen year old kid. In Brooklyn I had been patronized, ignored, or abused by
most of my so-called schoolmates. In Kingston High, where I now went to school,
the same was true, but here in Woodstock there was this other group of people
who accepted me. These were the Ďartistsí of the Woodstock art colony. They
also had an intense love of the place they lived; the community of Woodstock and
the Catskill Mountains. It gave me, for the first time in my life, an intense
feeling of BELONGING to something bigger than myself.

(One of the biggest reasons I like
living in Texas; itís the only place I ever saw where the inhabitants love to
sit around the campfire half the night singing songs about their home state. Can
you imagine this happening in New York? New Jersey? Of course not.)

Betty Ballantine was the first person I
ever heard sing a song while accompanying herself on a guitar. There was square
dancing at the Irvington Inn every Saturday night attended mostly by the artist
community. At the end of the dance, one night, Betty invited everyone to her
house to continue the party. She made sure that I, the shy teenager, knew I was
invited. The first song she did was UNFORTUNATE MISS BAILEY, about a young maiden
who hung herself in shame after allowing herself to be seduced by a Captain
Smith. Everybody at the party knew and loved the song and lustily joined in the
chorus;

But my real awakening to folk happened
in Washington Square one Sunday afternoon in October of 1947. There I saw all
sorts of people, kids like myself and adults, all singing the songs we came to
know as folk songs. It was a weekly gathering which moved indoors to Gabe Katzís
place when it got cold. This, for me, was the beginning of the so-called Urban
Folk Revival (UFR) and second introduction to the intense joy of group singing. I
started playing five string banjo at that time, giving up a promising career in
the world of business, to devote myself to music and women. For the next ten
years I learned to play the banjo and guitar.

From the age of seventeen to
twenty one I lived in a cold water flat on East Fifth and Avenue D in the lower
East side of New York. The rent was seventeen dollars a month. Besides the
people of the folk community I knew many young poets, painters, Anarchists,
Socialists, and Communists. I mention only a few of them who stayed
with me. Harold James Nicholas, a painter whom I admired. Trying to sublet
my apartment, I met a young woman, Ruth, who came to see the place. When I asked
her what she did for a living, she hesitated, blushed, and then said, quite
defiantly, "I'm a Communist". My friend Nikko's ears perked up at this
and before long the two were an item, big time. In
no time his paintings changed from what I can't remember, to heavy socialist art
a la Diego Rivera. It was a fascinating process to see.

Bob Kaufman was one of the early Beat Poets. His major piece was THE
ABOMINIST MANIFESTO, published by City Lights in San Francisco. He stayed for a
while. Bill Kehoe was an artist who spent most of his time drawing arrows,
cubes, geometric forms of all sorts. The conversations between him and
Nikko about art and life were fascinating and quite unintelligible to me. Eric
Weinberg stayed for a while. He was a carny and loved to do magic tricks.
Last I saw him was when I interviewed him on a public affairs program I ran on
WBAI in New York. He had just won a Peace Prize for his work in India.

John Kelly was a buddhist. He wrote and spoke Sanskrit. His
social graces were nil. I first knew him in my earliest Woodstock days.
Every few years he would inherit a few hundred thousand dollars from a departing
relative, which he would promptly give away. Later, when I was living in New
York, Ricky Sanchez asked me to put him up which I was glad to do. Most of
the time he did nothing but sit and meditate. I would leave for work in
the morning, when I worked as an orderly in the operating rooms at Beth David
Hospital, leaving John sitting on the living room floor with a cigarette burning
in his hand. He always held his cigarette straight up as he meditated. He would
still be in the exact same position when I returned hours later, the cigarette
out but the entire ash still in place, pointing up to the ceiling.

Rick Sanchez was a wild eyed painter who lived in Woodstock when I was a
fourteen year old, new to town. He later lived with Selma Benjamin who was one
of three women who frequently came to the Friday night folksings at Gabe
Katz's on East 10th Street, where the Washington Square folk crowd met when the
weather got too cold for outdoors. They were Anita Steckle, Selma Benjamin, and
Jeannie Neal. They were extremely hot and desirable to my virginal teenage
eyes. And they certainly livened up the folksings considerably. After a
few months they were followed by the drummers who changed the character of our
precious gatherings and most of the old time folkniks stopped coming.

I knew other musicians besides the folk players. Bob Casey, an old time Jazz
bassist, turned me on to playing at Columbus Circle for the tourist couples who
rode the horse carriages. I tried it one time. I was sitting on a bench on
the crowded circle playing my banjo very quietly. I was very shy then. A
black man started yelling at me for doing so, shouting "Why can't you let
us forget?" Apparently the negative stereotype of associating blacks with
banjos was still with him. This was the late forties. Pete Seeger was
pretty esoteric still, and Scruggs was not well known in New York.

Milliard Thomas was usually around. He played
classical guitar and taught me a few things about it. Harry Belfonte was
cooking burgers at the SAGE, a small joint on Sheridan Square. But my favorite
non folk musician was Tiger Haynes. He had a group called the THREE
FLAMES. They had a steady gig at a club on Eighth Street in the Village.
Tiger had a style of guitar that was incredible. He was a master of
harmonics. He loved a good friend of mine, Elaine Lanciano. She and
I loved playing together and Tiger and I became good friends.

During that time I became acquainted
with anarchy, poetry, Buddhism and marijuana. (But grass made me sick the first
three times I tried it because I smoked too much, too soon. I was a cigarette
smoker and smoked dope like it was tobacco. So, thinking, "Since it makes
me sick, it must make everybody sick. All those dopers must be masochists. I am
not a masochist," I gave it up for the next ten years. I had a lot to
learn.)

In 1951 I was about to be drafted and
sent to Korea to get killed so I decided I would not serve in the military under
any conditions. I would refuse induction. Thinking I was going to spend the next
ten years or so in prison, I made a Ďfinalí trip to Oregon with Mariel
Patterson. When we arrived at her motherís house in Portland there was a
telegram from Emmett Edwards (whom I had left in my apartment in New York)
telling me I was expected at the draft board in New York the next morning for my
army physical. I called the Portland draft board explaining my situation. They
told me to sit tight while they had me transferred. Two months later I took the
physical in Portland and I was 4F, no army, no jail. For those two months Mariel
and I worked picking blackberries. It was there, in the blackberry fields, that
I first heard a folk song in its natural setting--the forewoman of the picking
crew singing, in a lusty raucous voice, TWENTY-ONE YEARS. It was a thrill.

I hitchhiked to San Francisco, looking
forward with great anticipation to being in a new place where I could leave my
past, my hang-ups, and problems behind, and just be who I "really am!"
HAH!!

I met Barbara Dane, Rolf Cahn, Paul and
Jo Mapes, Stan Wilson, Lori Blakeslee and many other folksingers from the Bay
Area.

I married Lori and her two boys and we
went down to live in Mexico for a year. Then up to New Orleans where the heady
events of Rambliní Jack Elliottís
912 GREENS took place.

The dumbest thing I have ever
done was to leave my first wife, Lori. She is nine years older than me and
taught me valuable stuff I might never have learned without her. She played
guitar and sang like an angel. I left her because, in my raw post-adolescent
maturity, I thought I needed to be "free." And now, fifty-five years
later I realize that I had more freedom then than I have ever had since. Live
and learn!

In l954 a trip across the
country with Woodie Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Brew Moore, following
the woman I loved, landed me in a cheap downtown hotel in San Diego. Playing my
banjo in my room one evening attracted a young sailor, Roy Loveday, from
Knoxville, Tennessee, from the next room. He came in and we swapped
songs for a while. Then he came up with this gem.

A young girl, no more than
seventeen, seemingly down and out, heard us and came over, wanting to be part of
the party. When she saw I was really interested in Roy's songs, she went
back to her room for some writing material and wrote down for me some of
the songs he sang on her pink high school stationary.

In San Diego I got a job
driving a Good Humor Ice Cream truck with a music box. My music box was a
hopped up version of the Star-Spangled Banner. Being the new man, I got the
worst route, the one where the poor folks lived. My fellow drivers
suggested I steer clear of the "Pig farm", by which they meant the
Black enclave in National City. It was Sunday morning I first pulled in
there. There was a church with singing coming out of it. I sat in
the back until the music was over, the only white face there.

When church broke I went out
to my truck, hoping to sell some ice cream. I was completely ignored by the
departing congregation until one little girl couldn't resist checking me
out, I gave her an ice cream and she ran back to the group. That, of
course, got all the kids wanting ice cream and soon they were all there, nickels
and dimes in hand, trying to get some. I asked them if they knew any game songs
and was amply rewarded when a bunch of girls did,

"Little Sally Walker
settin' in a saucer,
Waitin' for the old man to
come for the dollar.
Ride, Sally, ride.
Put your hands on your hips,
Let your backbone slip. I
shake it to the East, I
shake it to the west, I
shake it to the very one that I love the best."

They did it with the little
dance, the handclapping, and all. Somehow, it was practically verbatim with Lomax's
version in FOLK SONG USA.

I had been in La Jolla for two years,
trying to make sense of it all. Frank Hamilton came down with Adam, a bass
player. We played music one night at my house and decided to form a folk trio. I went
back to L. A. with them. We stayed at Adam's house in Norwalk, but only
for a few days. Our trio did not work out, so Frank and I went to stay with Guy
Carawan in Venice, California. That was the beginning of a year in L. A. I hung out
with Herb Cohen, Frank, Odetta, Ramblin' Jack, Derroll Adams, Fred
Gerlach, Victor Maymudes and many others.

Then my very first fully professional
gig at the GATE OF HORN in Chicago. It was owned by Albert Grossman who
was a complete drag to work for. The bartender was called Spaghetti.

The first time I walked into
the place I was greeted with;

CUSTOMER: Hey Spaghetti, how
come you are called Spaghetti?
SPAGHETTI: Because I like to
eat spaghetti.
CUSTOMER: So why don't they
call Al Grossman Cunt?

It was downhill from there on.
A rough two weeks.

On to New York
where I lived with Dick Rosmini and his mother, Lucia Rosmini in the triangular
building at 40 Jane street in Greenwich Village. Bob Gibson was a regular there
and he and I got to be fairly tight. One day, driving uptown in his car, he
asked me, "Billy, how come you never
recorded?" I had no ready answer. Naturally I had fantasies of recording,
but never felt I was ready, whatever that means. I told Bob,
"No one ever asked me."

"Well, let's take a ride to
Riverside and see Bill Grauer." I had my banjo. We drove to Riverside
Records. On the way, we spoke of the possibility of me recording and Bob asked what I would
call it if it happened. I had just become acquainted with Johan Sebastian Bachís
ART OF THE FUGUE. I immediately answered,"The Art of the Five String Banjo.
Do you think thatís too much?" Bob grinned and said,"No, Man! I think its cool."

I had very little faith in the possible
outcome of this move. I know Bob meant well but I didnít think he had the
clout at Riverside. But Bill Grauer and Orin Keepnews both greeted us as soon as
we came in. I played for about ten minutes---I think I played SAILOR'S HORNPIPE.
Half an hour later I had a contract andBob and I walked out, pleased as punch.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted
Frank Hamilton to play guitar on my album. It was very hard refusing Dick
Rosmini, who wanted to do it in the worst way. He and Lucia had been very kind
to me, putting me up for months, but there were problems in my relationship with
Dick and I was afraid these problems would spill over into the music. Frank, on
the other hand, kept his feelings pretty much to himself. I had known him since
New Orleans when he arrived with Rambliní Jack and Guy Carawan. His guitar
playing was always rich, controlled, entirely appropriate, to the point, and
beautiful. And he was glad to do it.

The album would be produced by Kenneth
Goldstein who did all of Riverside's folklore series. I had many complaints about
the way he did it but I have long since gotten over it all. He got Pete Seeger
to do the back jacket notes, a great honor to me at the timeóand still.
I have replaced the original album cover with the photo of Frank Hamilton and I performing
at the l959 Newport Folk Festival.

The album was recorded in l957. A
year later I recorded TRAVELIN' MAN. Mostly solo.

1. Fiddler is Allan Block,sandlemaker. He
sold me my
first banjo and two lessons for
$20.

In July of 1957 I returned to
California to be with Barbara and our son. I met BARRY OLIVIER who was
the Bay Area's best promoter of folk music events. Unlike most music
promoters, Barry had integrity up the wazoo, was completely honest, and always
kept his word. In 1958 he produced the first Berkeley Folk Festival at the
University of California. I was not a star of the Festival but Barry, who loved
my music, went out of his way to help me shine. He put me on in concert at
the Berkeley Little Theater and at the North Gate Coffee House where he ran a
weekly folk music program.

In
1957 and 58 I had a half hour radio program,THE STORY OF FOLK MUSIC on station
KPFA, the very first listener sponsored station. Barry also had a show on that
station.

In December of '57 I produced myself in concert, for the first and only time, at
Fugazi Hall in San Francisco. The night after, Barry played a recording of that
concert on his radio show.
The pieces below are from the two concerts; Fugazi Hall, and the Berkeley Little
Theater.

In the late fifties I took over CARAVAN, The
Magazine of Folk Music from Lee Shaw who ran it as a fun-filled fanzine. I tried
to make a more scholarly magazine out of it. I think I published the very
first discography of Hillbilly music with the help of Archie Green.
Kennetha Stewart did most of the production work of the six or seven issues I
put out. Lee Haring, Roger Abrams, Archie Green, and many
other writers and musicians helped me with their contributions of many
kinds. No one got paid except the printer, Peter Strauss, who
also helped me out whenever he could. At the end he waited a long time for
his money. When I finally went to pay him I apologized for making him wait so
long.

He laughed and said,

"At least you paid me. Riverside still owes
me fifty-thousand bucks for the folk album covers."

In l958 my banjo and I became a nonessential
frill in the Broadway production of THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN. Meredith
Wilson wrote the music for the show. His father had played the five string
banjo and he always wanted to get a five string into one of his shows to honor
his father. It was a great job. I was only in one scene, the second, and
was through by nine o'clock. But I was expected to appear in costume at curtain
call, a real drag, after opening night. Here's how I worked that one out.
The stage manager, the real boss of the show after opening night, was John
Barrere. He was the son of the woman my ex-step father married two wives
after my mother. Vasco was on his second wife after Mrs. Barrere. I asked the
stage manager if I could be excused from curtain call.

"Absolutely not!", he said,
"If you are going to be in theater you must be a professional about it. You
have to have a dammed good reason to be excused from curtain call."

"I think I do, John."

"O yeah? What
is it?"

"We have the same ex-step-father."

"VASCO PINI?", he shouted. I
nodded.

"O, you poor kid. Go on."

About this time I got married again. My wife
and I bought some land in Lake Hill, near Woodstock, and started building a
house. By '61 the marriage was over and she got an Alabama divorce on the way to
California. I got turned on to Rock and roll big time by the Beatles. It was
their album, RUBBER SOUL that did it. And the Civil Rights movement was
heating up. These two influences combined in me and I wrote about two dozen
songs about sex, drugs, love, and Civil Rights. Many of
them became THE BEAST OF BILLY FAIER.John Sebastian plays guitar and harmonica on this
album. I met him years before when I was playing my guitar in Washington
Square. He was apprenticed to a guitar builder then and he talked me into
letting him rebuild my guitar under the supervision of his boss. I went
for it and when he brought the finished guitar back to me he played his harp
along with me as I was testing it out. He was a dynamite harp player
already. I asked him why he was learning to build guitars when really good
harmonica players were so rare and in demand in the recording studios. He said
he couldn't read music so he didn't think he could do it. I pointed out to him
that he had just played three tunes with me that he had never heard before
and didn't seem to have any trouble playing them. I urged him to try for
the sideman work that was going begging. About a year later he hailed me
on the street in Woodstock and announced that he had taken my advice and was
working almost full time playing the harp. And he told me how much he had
made in that year. It was four times my own income.

The BEAST came out in l964. I put all my
advertising eggs into the SING OUT basket, a huge mistake, as it turned out. In
the following issue publisher and editor, Irwin Silber wrote a long piece
slamming me because of a single line in very small type on the back of the
jacket, under the ordering coupon, NO ORDERS TAKEN FROM THE STATE OF
MISSISSIPPI. Swell-headed with the power of producing my own album, I was trying
to be both au courant and humorous. I would never do it today. But SING
OUT never reviewed the album. From my autobiography, written in 2006;

When I issued THE BEAST OF BILLY FAIER IN 1964, I made a symbolic gesture
on the back of the jacket. In small print under the price information it
said, NO ORDERS TAKEN FROM THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI. I never dreamed that
any intelligent person would take it seriously. It was stupid of me, not
well thought out. The idea of a personal boycott, however, came from the
pages of Sing Out, the left wing folk song journal run by Irwin Silber. In
issue after issue the idea of people making a personal stand in the cause of
equality, freedom, and justice was manifest, both openly and implicitly.
Silber wrote a scathing column about my stand.

After the opening polemics he says,

ĎPresumably Mr. Faier does not want to do business with white racists
in Mississippi.Should a negro in Mississippi
who might want to order one of Mr. Faierís records send along a photograph
or an affidavit testifying to his skin color.?í

Well Mr. Silber, your presumptions are wrong. I do not write for the
already convinced audience, looking for their applause at how well I can put
our mutually held convictions into song, as most of your topical songwriters
seem to do. White racists are the ones who I would love to sell my records
to in the hopes that the messages in my songs have an effect on them and
their racism. Thatís why I wrote the songs, to change people.

Furthermore, you never would have asked the question about the Ďnegro
in Mississippií if you didnít believe that all whites in Mississippi are
racists.

You called it an ass-backwards approach and a cheap trick to cash in on a
good cause. Gratuitous insults!!

You didnít like it because it didnít agree with your idea of
how the Civil Rights Movement should be fought. I could go on analyzing your
tripe. But the worst thing about it is that you didnít review the record.
Had you done so, along with your criticism of my efforts, I would have had
no complaints. And perhaps you would have changed your point of view about
who I am. Finally, having accepted the ad, and then turning around and
blasting it is really the cheapest trick of all. Money, money, money!!!

Website readers please forgive my digging up this old stuff. It has stuck
in my craw the last forty some odd years.

I wrote about fifteen Rock and Roll songs in the sixties. None of them
have ever been published or recorded, except for ROSE ANNE, on the BEAST. Go
down to the first
group, below.

I had a few Beatle songs in my repertoire. The only one I still do
is:

I think the best music I
have played on record is the album BANJO which I did for Takoma in 1973. That LP consisted of nine original
compositions, no folk stuff. I had just gotten turned on to John Fahey and
Takoma Records and I decided that I wanted to record for them. Cosmo
and I were planning a trip out West and we decided to give Takoma a try.

Gloria Anne Charles--Cosmo--is the most
talented person I have ever known in my life. The three years I spent
with her were the best I have ever known. She has absolutely magic
hands with which she creates beautiful things which, to ordinary mortals,
seem to be perfect. Her cooking, her sewing, her gardening, whatever
she does with her hands are always a delight. I taught her to play
guitar. In only a couple of months she was able to accompany me in
most of my music perfectly. I have been blessed!

Cosmo and I decided I
would walk into Takoma cold--just like at Riverside.

And it worked. Except that the place was so
weird, with so many unnecessary bullshit twists and turns that I can't remember anyone's
name there except for Billy Mundy, good cop, and John Fahey, bad cop. Fahey told the manager that the only reason he did the album was because,
"he liked the Rag.", a high order of faint praise, indeed. He
had heard a twenty minute test recording they had me do to play for him. The manager wanted me to use Ry Cooder on my album. Cooder was not yet the
superstar he is today so I was spared the necessity of making the agonizing
decision of having to decide between sales and musical integrity. Obviously he didn't think I could manage it alone. He produced a couple of other
musicians, guitar and mandolin, "the best in L.A. They can play your
stuff" After ten minutes of trying we all realized that they
couldn't. And there was no way they or I could pretend otherwise.

Not that my "stuff" is that hard. But musicians who can sit down and play with someone they have never seen or
heard before, and make the music ring true, are very rare. The act of hearing
music is almost totally separate and distinct from the act of playing music.

Hearing
music involves focusing and appreciating. Playing music involves muscular
action and different parts of the nervous system are involved.

After a couple of hours of dealing with all this
I realized that I didn't want to record under these circumstances. So we
agreed that I would handle the recording myself when I got back to
Woodstock.

On the way back we
stopped to check out Santa Fe and ran into Jerry Faires, Jim Bowie, and THE
FAMILY LOTUS. We made a strong connection with them. They loved my music and
played it like their own. We decided to use them for the Takoma recording.
But, in the studio we weren't able to recapture what had excited us about each
other before. However Cosmo and I became good friends with Jerry and
Jim. Jim Bowie is high on my list of great banjo players. Here is a take
from the unused recording. Jim's banjo doing the high parts. Hugh is
on the cello.

Sitting in Norma Cross' kitchen way up in upper
Byrdcliffe in Woodstock with Sara Lownes and some hippy guy who kept saying,
"Man, this is an existential crisis."The girls were throwing
the I Ching, and I was waiting to be alone with Sara. Early sixties.

Back in Woodstock I got Alex
Osina to record the Takoma Album. Alex was glad to do it for two hundred
dollars, which was the amount Takoma allowed me. I had spent that on the studio
in New Mexico so I had to pay Alex from my own pocket. We spent about two
weeks recording nine tunes on his tubular Ampex. When we were about finished I
spotted a tiny flutter of a whisper of sound against the places that were
supposed to be silent. It was a defective tube and we had to do it all over
again. It took us another week. By this time my chops were so good that
the entire thing came out wonderfully.

Cosmo painted a portrait of me
playing and included Pizza, my dog, for the album cover. And she sewed up
an old quilt pattern for the back, both of which made it to the final
cover. So, with all the outstanding crap and nonsense we went through, the
final result was worth it.

I did more folk and original
music on a cassette, with John Sebastian and Gilles Malkine in the eighties. Now
John was a superstar and it was a special honor to have him backing
me up. His harmonica playing on SONG OF THE CANYON MULE DRIVER is a very high
point of all my recorded music for me. Gilles provided some of the most
beautiful accompaniment I had experienced since my early work with Frank
Hamilton on my first album. There are only three traditional pieces
on this tape, THE GREAT ASSEMBLY, CLUCK OL' HEN, and SI ME QUIERES ESCRIBIR.
Except for KEMP'S JIG, which I don't know how to label, the
rest are all originals of mine.

Billy Faier and Gilles Malkine

I have two live performances on

CD. (Live at the Cafe Lena)
from the sixties and (Downstairs Concert
2007)

And I have
recorded and performed with many other folk singers though my main act was
always as a solo. I have traveled over the Western Hemisphere of the
Earth with my banjo on all levels from professional concertizer to itinerant
street musician. I live today in Marathon, Texas where I run my website,
billyfaier.com, and play banjo and piano.

A few years ago I donated all my
old reel to reel tapes and papers, letters etc. to the Southern Folklife
Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chappell Hill. The request
came through Bill Ferris, a well known folk and blues collector who is
also donor to the collection. I was surprised and flattered by the request
and I asked Bill,

"Why me? There are
thousands of folksingers like me." Ferris laughed and said, "No
Billy, there are only about five of you old timers who not only have been
playing since the late forties, but who have also made a significant
contribution to their art form." I could live with that and I made the
donations.

Recently I have been having
difficulties playing. After ten minutes, more or less, my hand gets numb,
and I can't play. Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, it seems to be. It was obvious
that if the usual therapy (a minor surgical procedure) were not effective, my
professional career, such as it is, was over. If I could not record again
I needed to gather up everything I had ever done. So I recently went to North
Carolina and went through all those old tapes, mostly stuff I had done around my
house, and, to my delight, found eighty good pieces instead of the dozen
or so I had expected. Instrumentals and songs I forgot I had recorded were
there. Even a couple of things I had no memory of at all. None ever
commercially recorded. A real find.

Finding those eighty pieces of my old playing was incredible. But even more incredible is the fact
that I had the Carpel Tunnel operation in San Francisco on July 7th, and now the operation seems to be a success.
My playing is coming
back quickly, better than it has been for the last four years. I had gone back
to these old tapes expecting to find maybe six
or seven pieces I could use. I wanted to use them to sell on CD's because if the
operation was not a real success, my playing career was over. So I am blessed
with both; my playing and these old pieces I had forgotten about.

I have roughly divided these pieces into
groupings for the purposes of this website.

Previously unpublished performances

Original songs

Some songs, some arrangements of songs collected

Arrangements of songs learned from others

Concert
at Fugazi Hall, San Francisco, December 18, 1957.

Concert
at

Berkeley Little Theater, Berkeley,
California,
May 2, 1958.

To those of you who have
purchased my CDs, my heartfelt thanks. But now I have decided to make all my
music free and available to everyone. You can listen to it right here or
download it by clicking on the album names above or the album images below.

If you still wish to purchase the
albums in CD form, they are also still available, as are tablatures of
many of my tunes. Your donations are welcome and should be sent to: